A title is a promise you can keep

The title is the first sentence strangers read, and it is doing sales work whether you like the idea or not. It should be sayable, spellable, and honest about the kind of book that follows. A clever title that nobody can repeat from memory is a private joke.

Make a list without falling in love with the first option. Ten titles, some plain, some too large, some stolen from a line you already wrote. Then test them the way a bookseller would: said aloud to someone who has not read the manuscript. If you have to explain it, it is not done working.

A promise you cannot keep will annoy the reader who bought it. If the title suggests a thriller, the book should thrill. If it suggests a joke, the book should be willing to be funny. Tone is part of the promise. So is scope. A title that sounds like an epic sitting on a novella is a disappointment before page one.

Look at the shelf you want to sit on, not to copy a formula, but to see which titles you can remember a week later. The memorable ones are usually concrete, a little odd, and short enough to fit on a spine without shrinking into apology.

You may change it later. Agents do, publishers do, you will. Do not use that as a reason to call the file Untitled_final_3. A working title gives the project a face, and a face is easier to return to than a document number.